The Price of Stereotyping

A friend once, at Christmastime, commented that in Boston, Christmas lights on Protestant houses tended to be multi-colored while Catholic houses tended to have white lights. I noted that in Maryland it tended to be the opposite way, with white on Protestant houses and multi-colored on Catholic. We both of course were stereotyping. It’s so easy.  It was even easier to do so by religion rather than by location-based cultural differences, though those too would be stereotypes. It was harmless for us, since no malice was meant or perceived by either of us. But the Charlie Hebdo situation reinforces how costly such stereotyping can become.

I have emphasized my views about the strains of modernization tearing at the Middle East. A proud culture had its golden age torn apart in the 13^th century by the Crusades, the Mongol and Turkic invasions, and immediately thereafter by the Black Death, which killed a higher percentage of the population there than it did in Europe.  It was natural to blame faithlessness and foreign influences for everything – after all did not the Torah blame the Babylonian Exile on faithlessness also? -  and the Arabic culture withdrew into a shell lasting for centuries and eventually resulting in Sunni Wahhabism. Now western modernization has reached the Arabic Middle-East, and the backlash against that modernization has produced the terrorism by small Islamic minorities akin to the KKK movement in the southern U.S. after the American Civil War. For make no mistake, there is an Arab Civil War raging now, akin to Europe’s Thirty Years War, which eventually will give way to a modern Middle East. Nowhere are the dangers of religious stereotyping better illustrated than by modern Indonesia, the largest Islamic nation, whose modern Islamic culture is further removed from that of Wahhabic Saudi-Arabia than Liberal Episcopalians are from Primitive Baptists in America. Yet we, and many Muslims, persist in harboring grudges against Islam or Christianity as though each were a gigantic monolith.

Stereotyping makes us cast the Charlie Hebdo tragedy as Mohammed versus Freedom of Expression. Yet Fareed Zakaria points out that most Islamic scholars agree that there is no reference to or repudiation of blasphemy in the Koran, and that picturing Mohammed as an offensive act is a tenet of Wahhabism only, not Islam in general. And when we teach our two-year-old to use an “inside voice” or our older children not to use profanity at the dinner table or grade movies as X or PG, are we not limiting Freedom of Expression? The price of stereotyping is that it limits our awareness of the nuances of behavior and our sensitivity to the need to respect differences.

A January 14 article in the Washington Post by Yasmine Bahrani, a Journalism Professor at the American University in Dubai, and today’s comments by Pope Francis both speak to that need to respect differences. Bahrani writes of how stereotyping causes her students, who largely are “modern Muslims” who feel shame at backward practices like segregating women, to take seriously such claims as that the CIA organized fake vaccination drives in Pakistan and that the prosecution of Tsarnaev in Boston is a set-up. To them, America lacks credibility – and they are the Arabs who should be leaning toward, not away from, us.

Pope Francis speaks to the essence of the Freedom of Expression issue when he, like Giuseppe Mazzini long before him, reminds us to look not to our rights, but to our obligations to others. The killings at Charlie Hebdo were inexcusable and tragic, but the killings by a small minority of Muslims do not justify giving deliberate offense to what we believe, erroneously, are the views of all Muslims in the name of Freedom of Expression. Just as we might avoid challenging an elderly relative’s views on FDR or Reagan at the Thanksgiving dinner table both to be civil and because we love them, we need to remember our obligation to respect cultural differences. Yes, you have a right to Freedom of Expression, and yes, you have an obligation to avoid speech which you know is deliberately and unnecessarily offensive. J.S. Mill, the “Father of Modern Liberalism”, wrote that the only political speech that is truly offensive is a personally derogatory remark about an opponent. When stereotyping both on your part and on an Arab’s part causes both of you to regard picturing Mohammed to be offensive, then you have the right to do so anyway, but you have the obligation to respect cultural sensitivities. The relationships between all parts of an increasingly complex global society need to be strengthened, not attacked. We share the world together.